2007/04/22

Another example of upping the "physical world connection" ante from the 2D barcode players. Magnet Harlequin, a UK marketing/technology company, is using image recognition technology called Snap Happy to analyze images sent in by users so a suitable response can be sent back to the user. This is already in action as it was used to promote the latest Mr. Bean movie in the UK earlier this year. Users snap a pic of the movie poster with their mobile and send it via MMS. They then get directed to some free Mr. Bean content. Very nice. Indeed this is one small step to "creating an internet of physical things". This appears to be just what Mobot is doing.While I do think this is very cool and has tons of applications, I do not think this will displace barcodes any time soon. At least not barcodes that can store information (and not just a reference to information on a server somewhere). Server-side image recognition is an interesting call-to-action, but client-side decoding is faster and more practical in less sensational, everyday cases.